Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

This week, I'm looking at the versatility of online education platforms. That is, what are the other ways that law schools can leverage online learning once they have developed an online or hybrid J.D. program? Nina Kohn from Syracuse University College of Law walks me through how her school has expanded its program offerings using online courses. Next up, I'm checking in on Ave Maria School of Law, which I have (somewhat jokingly) dubbed the law school that fast food built, thanks to big money donations from big names in quick meals.

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter: @KarenSloanNLJ

The Many Possibilities for Online Legal Education

Back in December, I got an email from Syracuse University College of Law announcing the launch of a new hybrid J.D./MBA program, which students can complete largely online in a bit over four years. It caught my eye for a few reasons, one being that it's apparently the first J.D./MBA program in the country to be offered almost entirely online. But I also took note of the fact that the program was unveiled a mere year after Syracuse launched JDInteractive, the school's online J.D. program. That struck me as a fairly rapid expansion of its online offerings.

Then this month, I heard from Syracuse again. It was touting the upcoming "Third Year Away" program, which will allow third-year law students in the traditional J.D. program to spend the year off-campus in externships, while taking online classes taught by regular faculty. (The program is akin to what Washburn University School of Law has done with its Third Year Anywhere program, with some minor differences.) Nina Kohn, the faculty director of online education at Syracuse, told me last week that the idea behind the new program is to allow third-year students to get some practical experience in the locations where they aspire to practice. (It will only become available to the new first-year students who start this fall.)

So each of these new offerings is leveraging the online course platform that Syracuse created for the core JDInteractive program, but for slightly different populations of students. That got me thinking about the idea of online JDs being, perhaps, more versatile than I had initially understood them to be. Once a school has invested the money necessary to develop online courses—and convinced faculty to teach those courses—it makes sense to figure out other ways to use that technology for all students.

Kohn told me she didn't have a game plan for additional online programs when she was launching JDInteractive, but it quickly became apparent to her once that program was underway of the other possibilities.

"We realized, as we had built out this group of robust upper-level online courses, that we could allow students the best of both worlds," she said of the Third Year Away initiative. "They could go to a city where they are looking to practice and begin to apply what they're learning in a supervised setting, and at the same time take courses from our regular faculty. You can be in D.C. and still be taking, say, business associations from your favorite professor at the law school."

The key to fully leveraging online courses, though, is for those classes to be just as good as the ones offered to the residential law students, Kohn said. That's the primary reason that Syracuse has opted to make its online classes at least 50% live and synchronous, meaning professors and students interact in real time for at least half of their course. That format limits class sizes in a way that fully asynchronous classes don't, Kohn noted, but she believes that the interaction provides a richer educational experience than simply allowing students to watch lecture videos on their own.

Another benefit to expanding online course offerings is that it creates opportunities for students in the online and residential programs to take classes together and create a law school-wide community, Kohn noted. For now, the online classes will only be open to residential students in the Third Year Away program, but that could expand over time.

"It a process of continually thinking it through and [considering] what works for students," Kohn told me. "What's really exciting is once you figure out that there are these different building blocks of the law school experience, then you can just ask the basic question of, 'What do your students need?' It expands the tools you have at your disposal to meet your students' needs."

The Law School that Fast Food Built

I don't report every big-money law school donation I hear about. Gifts of $1 million and up are increasingly common, so it's hard to keep up with all of them. But I can't resist highlighting a new $2 million gift announced last week by Ave Maria School of Law. You see, the money is coming from Peter Cancro and his wife, Tatiana. Cancro is the founder and owner of Jersey Mike's—a sub sandwich chain that has more than 1,500 locations across the country. So there are a few reasons why this is worth noting, the first of which is irony. The money is being used to fund Ave Maria's new wellness center—a nearly 22,000-square-foot facility that is nearing completion and will now be named for Cancro. The fitness complex includes basketball courts, a soccer field, spin bikes and more. Now I've never eaten at a Jersey Mike's, but subs don't exactly strike me as your typical health food. Turns out a regular-sized meatball and cheese sub from Jersey Mike's come in at a hefty 810 calories. It will take a lot of time on the spin bike to work off those calories. But in all seriousness, I think it's great that Ave Maria is investing in student wellness and the new facility sounds pretty great. But the other reason I found it interesting is because Ave Maria owes its existence to pizza. It was established in 2000 (Happy 20th anniversary!) by Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan as an independent, Catholic law school in Ann Arbor, Mich. The school relocated to Naples, Florida in 2009. I sort of the love the idea of fast food titans focusing their philanthropy on a law school.

Your move, Jimmy John's.

Extra Credit Reading

For the first time ever, the top 16 flagship law journals in the nation are being led by women. That shift is the topic of a panel hosted by Duke Law School next week on the progress of women in the legal profession.

University of Minnesota law professor Edward Adams was sentenced to two years of probation and a $5,000 fine for underreporting his income to the IRS from 2008 to 2010.

Creighton University Law Dean Joshua Fershee earned some love on Twitter for offering to watch the children of faculty, staff, and students in his office on a day when a snowstorm shuttered public schools.

A growing number of law schools are establishing food pantries on campus to help students put food on the table. At least four schools have done so in the past year.

Thanks for reading Ahead of the Curve. Sign up for the newsletter and check out past issues here. I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]